🚀 go-pugleaf

I don't know why everyone is so eager to apologize for Apple.  
As to the Macintosh being reliable, that may or may not be a statistically
true statement.  However, if you're the statistic, all claims about 
reliability become meaningless.  In my case, I had a digital board
fail (fortunately under warranty) and thanks to some bad attitudes on the
part of both Apple and the local service people, I had a miserable time
getting the thing fixed.  Recently, I seem to have acquired power supply
troubles evidenced by loss of focus on the display and screen width which
varies with screen brightness.  There are rumors floating around about 
premature failures of Mac power supplies, but no hard figures..

As to the desirability of a closed architecture, the choice was a big
mistake on Apple's part in selling to the scientific/engineering 
community.  Currently, the only way to get data into the thing is through
the serial ports, and you can forget about adding a math coprocessor or
hard disk controller. (unless you're willing to void the warranty and
hack the hardware).  I should note that Reed College has made a truly
noble effort with RASCAL in trying to make the Macintosh a useful machine
for data acquisition and instrumentation control, but nevertheless, they
still have to cope with the bottleneck of going through the serial port.

As a final note, due to the lack of hard disk capability in the Macintosh
Finder (hopefully corrected with 4.1) and in the hardware, it is obvious
that Apple did not intend for people to develop software on the machine.
Again, I congratulate Reed's Maclab on putting together an editor/compile
and linker that fits on one disk with room left over for programs, thus
making even a single drive Mac a useful development machine.  Despite the
Certified Developer's Program, many among the "rest of us" have put together
excellent software packages, Versaterm and RedRyder being two obvious 
examples.

The matter of Apple restricting technical information needed to develop
software on their machines is nontrivial.  Two issues of Byte, for example
had several letters from readers complaining about difficulties in obtaining
Apple IIc and Macintosh documentation.  Even Electrical Engineering Times
had an article about Apple's rather bizzare attitudes towards technically
adept users of their products.  Since the home computer market is cyclical 
at best, and the business market is becoming saturated, Apple for its own
sake would do well to cultivate technically-oriented customers.

a 
 
-- 
All opinions expressed here are my own and not necessarily
those of my employer
Ronald A. Iltis
UCSB Dept. ECE